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<table width="100%" summary="page for CRANpackages"><tr><td>CRANpackages</td><td style="text-align: right;">R Documentation</td></tr></table>

<h2> Growth of CRAN </h2>

<h3>Description</h3>

<p>Data casually collected on the number of packages on the Comprehensive
R Archive Network (CRAN) at different dates.
</p>
<p>NOTE:  This could change in the future.  See Details below.  
</p>


<h3>Usage</h3>

<pre>
data(CRANpackages)
</pre>


<h3>Format</h3>

<p>A <code>data.frame</code> containing:
</p>

<dl>
<dt>Version</dt><dd>
<p>an ordered factor of the R version number primarily in use at the
time.  This was taken from archives of the major releases at
<a href="https://svn.r-project.org/R/branches/R-1-3-patches/tests/internet.Rout.save">https://svn.r-project.org/R/branches/R-1-3-patches/tests/internet.Rout.save</a>,
...
<a href="https://svn.r-project.org/R/branches/R-3-1-branch/tests/internet.Rout.save">https://svn.r-project.org/R/branches/R-3-1-branch/tests/internet.Rout.save</a>
</p>
</dd>
<dt>Date</dt><dd>
<p>an object of class <code>Date</code> giving the date on which the count
of the number of CRAN packages was determined.
</p>
</dd>
<dt>Packages</dt><dd>
<p>an integer number of packages on the CRAN mirror checked on the
indicated <code>Date</code>.
</p>
</dd>
<dt>Source</dt><dd>
<p>A factor giving the source (person) who collected the data.
</p>
</dd>
</dl>



<h3>Details</h3>

<p>This seems to provide the most widely available source for data on the
growth of CRAN, manually recorded by John Fox and Spencer Graves.  For
a discussion of these and related data, see Fox (2009).
</p>
<p>For more detail, see the 
<a href="https://github.com/hadley/cran-packages">CRAN packages</a> data on 
Github maintained by Hadley Wickham.  This contains the description
file of every package uploaded to CRAN prior to the date of Hadley's
most recent update.  The current maintainer of the <code>Ecdat</code> and 
<code>Ecfun</code> packages would consider contributions along the 
following lines:  
</p>
<p>1.  It might be nice to have a more complete dataset or datasets 
showing CRAN growth.  This might include code fitting multiple 
models and predicting future growth with error bounds computed 
using Bayesian Model Averaging.  These model fits might make an 
interesting addition to the examples in this help file.  With a 
little more effort, it might make an interesting note for 
<em>R Journal</em>.  Functions written to fit those models might 
be added to the <code>Ecfun</code> package.  
</p>
<p>2.  It might be nice to have a function in <code>Ecfun</code> to 
download the 
<a href="https://github.com/hadley/cran-packages">CRAN packages</a>  
data from Github and convert it to a format suitable for 
updating this dataset.  
</p>
<p>The current maintainer for <code>Ecdat</code> and <code>Ecfun</code> 
(Spencer Graves) might be willing to accept code and 
documentation for this but is not ready to do it himself at 
the present time.  
</p>


<h3>Source</h3>

<p>John Fox, &quot;Aspects of the Social Organization and Trajectory of the R
Project&quot;, <em>R Journal</em>, 1(2), Dec. 2009, 5-13.
<a href="https://journal.r-project.org/archive/2009-2/RJournal_2009-2_Fox.pdf">https://journal.r-project.org/archive/2009-2/RJournal_2009-2_Fox.pdf</a>,
accessed 2014-04-13.
</p>


<h3>Examples</h3>

<pre>
plot(Packages~Date, CRANpackages, log='y')
# almost exponential growth
</pre>


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